Defining Twilight Essay
by recnad865
Summary: This is my defining Twilight essay. It's on here for the mean time purely for logistical purposes until I can delete it! Read and review if you wanna!


You sit at home, unable to move, crippled by obsession. Any erratic sound or movement triggers something electric in you brain. The midnight hour has long passed, but you can't seem to succumb to sleep. It is not about simply wanting to find out what happens around the next curve, but that you _have _to find out what happens next. You fear you are going crazy. But what mundane object could trigger such suspense and emotion? What could cause such an…obsession? There is only one thing known to man that could make one be more interested in a storyline than to sleep, eat, or think about anything else but that one object-_Twilight _by Stephenie Meyer.

I have to ask myself a simple question. How would one "define" the incredible oddity that seems omnipresent in today's society? The dictionary definition for the term twilight is "the soft, diffused light from the sky when the sun is below the horizon." To anyone you might ask who crosses your path may assert something as facile as "It is just an amazing story." Indeed, the story is miraculous, but I would like to take the definition to a much deeper level. Something as phenomenal as _Twilight _needs a more noble denotation. Therefore, I strive to achieve this immense feat.

To a neophyte to the _Twilight _universe, a zealot of the series might seem fanatical. I feel that they draw false conclusions about we "Twilighters" because they have not yet themselves acquired the savoir-faire needed to really appreciate its abundant offering intellectually. If I were to give advice to someone who automatically despises _Twilight _only because it has gotten so much hype over the past few months, I would say to at least give it a chance. It would not be the object of immense mass hysteria it is today if it was not worth investigating. Truth be told, these people have hypocritical critiques of something they just do not understand. They more than likely have discovered something at one time or another that they enjoyed so thoroughly that they wanted to share their passion for it to the world.

What makes _Twilight _worth all the hype? In my opinion, it is the way Meyer epitomizes her characters. Edward Cullen does not simply _walk _across a room. By the end of her description, Edward will have _sauntered _across him room to further dazzle our favorite story heroine, Bella Swan. At the beginning of the beloved novel, _Twilight, _the reader, and Bella, felt as if Edward detested Bella. Along down the storyline, we find that Mr. Cullen only had an intense craving to taste her blood. Each event in the story either connects with another even, intensifies the suspense, or adds irony to a given situation. Furthermore, an event that one might think is inconsequential would be of utmost importance later on. In a broader sense, the fact that Edward was not able to read Bella's mind in the first three books seems lucid, but gives way to her "special ability" in _Breaking _Dawn. Had Edward been able to read her mind prior to the conclusion of the series , we _Twilight _aficionados would have missed out on an exemplary ending to a breathtaking saga. It takes a very skillful writer to accomplish this accurately and Meyer is a master of her craft.

On a lighter note, I would personally define _Twilight_, not as an obsession, but as a way of life. Since discovering it two years ago, its very essence has incorporated itself thoroughly into my being. When meeting new people, one of the more exponential things I ask is if they have heard of the series. Asking such a question is quite extraneous now that the film has been released. I cannot say that its success has surprised me in the least. To give an example of the extent of my love for the series, if I were to be exiled on an uncharted island, if I did not have my _Twilight _books or my copious amounts of _Twilight _paraphernalia, I would continue to be a rather joyous individual.

Ultimately, defining _Twilight _is a difficult and quite literally impossible task. To millions upon million of teenage girls, their mothers, and the occasional being with a "Y" chromosome, _Twilight_ has slowly etched its way into today's society with more permanence than ever expected. After all, the series began with only a dream. "A succession of images, thoughts, or emotions, passing trough the mind during sleep."

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